The Bureau;

On the night of January 8, 2020, a Boeing 737 carrying 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents climbed out of Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and was destroyed by two missiles fired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One hundred and seventy-six people died. Iran denied it for three days, bulldozed the crash site, and then blamed a single soldier’s misidentification error.

Canada accepted that framing, more or less. It still does.

This week, Mohammad Javad Zarif — Iran’s former foreign minister, now a prominent public advocate for Tehran’s position in its war with the United States and its allies — posted publicly that Western military action constitutes a war crime involving the deliberate killing of civilians.

The statement drew wide attention. It drew no attention to the fact that Zarif is the same official who, in a secretly recorded conversation obtained and studied by Canadian security agencies in the months after PS752 was destroyed, privately acknowledged that an organized, intentional attack on that civilian aircraft was “not at all unlikely” — and that the truth would never be revealed because doing so would expose the inner workings of Iran’s defense systems.

That tape should not be treated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and CSIS as a mere artefact of history. Recent events have only strengthened the case against Iran.[…]

In early March 2026, Iranian missiles struck Camp Canada at Ali Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, damaging bunkers where about 200 Canadian Armed Forces personnel were sheltering. Iran also launched missiles at non-combatant nations in the region, suggesting an asymmetric strategy aimed at dividing the US-led campaign from potential allied supporters.

Russia feeds Iran targeting data for such strikes.

The Carney government sat on the Canadian base strike story for eleven days, until a French-language newspaper in Montreal broke it. Conservative defense critic James Bezan called the silence shameful.